Friday, July 17, 2009

What would you do?

I know I'm pretty young, but I've had quite a few different types of jobs in the eight years that I've been working to earn my own stuff. Teaching is by far one of the hardest.

There are a million things that go into it. It seems so easy when you watch but the moment you step up in the front of that classroom you are instantly praying for the forgiveness of all your former teachers.

Don't get me wrong, it's a ton of fun. It is just so draining. It takes everything out of you to get through these classes, but it's the little things that make it completely worth it.

I had a particularly chatty class yesterday. They were a lot of fun. I love when my classes will actually talk to me. It makes my life a little easier. I mean, the point is that they learn to speak English right?

Two of the boys made up this classroom version of basketball. This does not mean it is safer to play in the classroom, just that they incorporate the chairs and such things.

The rest of us just sat around and watched them as they wiggled across the classroom on the chairs and tried to throw the "dice" into the "baskets" behind each other.

Since they were so chatty, I decided it would be a good idea to test their ability to construct sentences. The idea in this game is that each side picks letters for the other team. Then the kids have to make up sentences that have at least one word that begins with each letter.

The kids are evil (just like we all were at their age) so of course they picked "ZNQW" and "BCSX." I told them they could use words that had "Z" or "X" in them instead of beginning with them because even I can only think of a few words off hand.

Their sentences don't always make the most sense, but you can see they're at least trying and they get the concept.

I kind of love this game.

As far today, I had my News Camp for the second time. It was equally as boring and I'm considering turning it into an entirely games class. We did have a little fun. I gave them a headline: "Earthquake shakes Taiwan" and they had to tell me what questions they would ask if it were a story they were covering.

I just happened to have answers (some were real details from an earthquake earlier this week and some were made up just to get the idea) and then I made them each write a quick little news brief.

I'm thinking this might be the way to go for the demonstration we have to do in four weeks for their parents.

I think the big problem with this class is that one of the kids doesn't want to be there and his sister flat out doesn't understand me. She didn't even understand when I told the class to bring a news article.

I tried to tell the school director, but it seems he doesn't understand either.

This is ultimately the problem of working at a for-profit school. It's not about what is in the kids' best interests. If it were, this girl wouldn't be in a higher level class when she doesn't belong there.

Any suggestions for what I should do: A) to have more fun with middle school kids and the news and B) to incorporate a girl who hardly speaks any English compared to the other kids?

I am almost to the point that I have to just ignore them and work with the other kids. Unfortunately, I am not afforded the time to work solely with these two kids.